Blacksmith Hits $1B Unicorn Valuation as Sequoia Leads $66M Series C
Blacksmith, a platform that helps companies build and test software more efficiently β including code written by AI β announced Wednesday a $66 million Series C funding round led by Sequoia. The round values the company at $1 billion, cementing its unicorn status.
Built to Make CI Less Painful
In announcing the round, Blacksmith co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said the company was founded to make continuous integration (CI) β the process of building, testing, merging, and validating code changes β "less painful." In a blog post, he noted that "most companies are struggling to keep up with the volume of CI they need to run," particularly in an era where so much code is written by AI.
"As agents write more of the world's software, the question that matters is whether it can be trusted," he added.
Rapid Growth and Traction
The company also reported that its annual recurring revenue has grown 17x and that it has run over 90 million CI jobs β individual automated code checks. Its customer base includes Mercury and Granola.
A Valuation That Jumped 10x in Two Months
The Series C comes just two months after Blacksmith's $45 million Series B, which valued the company at $550 million. A year ago, Blacksmith was valued at $60 million following a $10 million Series A. The company has raised $125 million to date.
The funding trajectory reflects the broader 2026 surge in demand for software validation tooling, as AI coding agents generate an ever-larger share of production code and enterprises race to verify that it can be trusted before it ships.
via TechCrunch